Petersen's Hunting October 2018

I grew up solidly middle class in middle America. We were farmers, which means family vacations were wedged into the few weeks between wheat harvest and the first day of school. For these late-summer getaways, Dad would pack the wagon with tents and sleeping bags, a lantern, and his classic, green Coleman stove. Our road trips took us all over the West, camping in the Black Hills and Rocky Mountains. Once, we drove all the way to the Pacific Ocean, then circled back through the ghost towns and abandoned mines of Nevada. I still have a handful of old .36- and .44-caliber casings found in the dust of an ancient frontier settlement. Those childhood adventures instilled a love of traveling, particularly over the wide and open roads of the West. Like…

I loved Joseph von Benedikt’s “Cartridge Corner” on the .338 Win. Mag. in the October 2017 issue, and I completely share his admiration for this fine cartridge! Here is a photo of my elk hunt last fall outside Joseph, Oregon. This nice old bull fell promptly at 392 yards with one shot from my 20-inch “coast range carbine” with a 200-grain Nosler Ballistic Tip at 2,800 fps. As with many of us who love hunting and the great outdoors, I have always enjoyed a good story, and the factual recounts in your publication are absolutely exhilarating! As I also suspect, for many of us the idea of “what lies around the corner” is central to the adventure, and I also love the occasional imagination-fueled recount from that proverbial “hunt of a lifetime.” PETE…

Pull into a boat ramp on Arkansas’s Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area three hours before legal shooting light and you’ll be greeted by a line of trucks hundreds of yards long. When the mallards are migrating, it seems like everyone with a sack of decoys and a duck call wants in on the action. If you believe even a fraction of what you read, those hunters are the last vestiges of a dying endeavor, the remnants of a once-thriving culture that is fading into obscurity. Anti-hunting groups celebrate “the death of hunting,” and even hunters fret about the looming demise of the sport. Hunting, we are told, is on life support. But don’t tell the thousands of duck hunters who flock to Arkansas’s green timber public hunting areas like Bayou Meto every…

BULLET BASICS Designed to combine the enhanced aerodynamics of Nosler’s boattailed Ballistic Tip cup-and-core bullet with deep-penetrating, bone-breaking toughness, the AccuBond features a lead core bonded to a beautifully concentric jacket. Said jacket is thin at the nose to promote immediate expansion and then becomes rapidly thicker toward the rear of the bullet. This gives the jacket the needed integrity to slow and halt expansion with a good portion of the shank still intact, resulting in the classic mushroom shape. TESTING GROUND The bullet pictured was used to take a massive, 10-foot coastal brown bear on the Alaska Peninsula. Fired from hunter Brian Ham’s Ruger Model 77 in .338 Win. Mag., it impacted at 142 yards, traveling at an estimated 2,430 fps and carrying 3,300 ft.-lbs. of energy. FIELD PERFORMANCE Hitting the boar directly on…

WHERE: North Dakota WHEN: Fall 2016 NET SCORE: 196 3/8 BOW: Xpedition Xcentric HUNTER: Cole Frenzel “There’s no question our resources are becoming monetized, and that will squeeze some people out of the sport, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to hunt if you don’t want to,” he said. “That’s the beauty of our public lands system.” The federal government alone owns more than 600 million acres. Most is open to hunting. State-owned land and various private-property lease programs add millions more acres of opportunity. For example, Montana’s Block Management Program opens 7.3 million acres of private land to public hunting. “Our public lands system is the envy of the world,” said Dr. Robert Holsman, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources research scientist. “There is nothing else like it, and the hunting opportunities available…

HISTORY Based on a necked-down, shortened 6.8 SPC case, the .224 Valkyrie is magazine compatible even when loaded with extremely long bullets. As a result, the cartridge not only provides greater case capacity than the .223 Remington, but also AR-15s feed cleanly with bullets of much higher ballistic coefficients—projectiles such as Sierra’s 90- rain MatchKing (G1 BC .563) and Fusion’s 90-grain deer bullet. Most barrels are spec’d with a rifling twist rate of 1 turn in 7 inches in order to stabilize these super-long projectiles. APPLICATION Although engineered to extend the AR-15s range, the .224 Valkyrie is actually a good hunting cartridge. Loaded with heavy-for-caliber hunting bullets, it provides good expansion coupled with unprecedented penetration on deer-size game. Opt for Federal’s lighter 60-grain Nosler Ballistic Tip for a sizzling-fast predator. And should you…